Wednesday, March 11, 2015

As I prepared my speech for Being ME, Muslimah Empowered, a
conference in Toronto attended by over 4000 women, it dawned on me that this
would be my first time addressing a majority immigrant audience on the ways in which Muslims
perpetuate racism in our mosque communities. Since publishing my book on this
topic six years ago, I’ve given a handful of talks on relations between African
American and immigrant Muslims, but not once had I been asked to “confront
racism,” to discuss the “hierarchies that pit Muslim against Muslim,” and to
push Muslims “to self-reflect and question our own culpability in perpetuating
this hate.”

The conference organizers

The women who asked me to do this were second-generation Canadian women, the
daughters of desi (referring to the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora; South
Asian), Arab, and East African immigrants. The conference’s theme was “Qur’an:
A Compass to Compassion,” and my charge was “to focus on how we can develop
true fellowship and raise an ummah built on compassion.”

Whoever thought to invite me had definitely read
my book as that is partly what I seek to do in its 300 pages. My challenge was
to present this message in roughly twelve pages and to convince an audience who
I would also critique. It would require the skill of pulling together the perfect
stories, quotes, and analysis on race; work that I love to do.

After my talk, a black Canadian woman of my
generation (born Muslim, the daughter of converts of African and Native
American descent) said to me, “The way that you laid out the stories and
perspectives was unique. You made it accessible. At first I wasn’t sure how the
aunties were going to take it, but I watched them, and they were feeling it.
Just the fact that you were standing up there speakingthose wordstothese
peoplewas awesome.”

Several people remarked with sentiments ranging from “Wow, I never thought about it that way” to “You usually don’t hear socially
relevant talks like yours at conferences like these.” I responded, “Alhamdulillah,
thank the conference organizers for inviting me.”

Conference organizers and volunteers

My talk

I started my talk with the story at the
beginning of my book: a conversation between an African American convert, an
Eritrean immigrant, and a Pakistani immigrant. The dialogue occurred after an
Arabic lesson in the Eritrean woman’s home. The two immigrant women insult and
alienate the African American convert after she described the racism she experienced at an
immigrant mosque. They tell her that the racism she feels is her “perception”
and that she “stresses” race too much. After this, the convert woman never
again joins the women for Arabic lessons.

This story reveals both the awesomeness and the
sadness of the North American ummah (Muslim community). We have ummah spaces
like the masjid and the Eritrean woman’s home that bring together people of
diverse ethnic backgrounds who do not ordinarily come together in intimate
spaces because of longstanding structures of racism. This means that we have
this unparalleled opportunity to confront racism and cross boundaries; but
sadly, we do not show the compassion or use the tools to learn from one another
and create true sisterhood. The main tool highlighted in my talk was the
Qur’anic verse, “Humanity, We created you all from a single man and a single
woman, and made you into nations and tribes so that you should get
to know one another. In God’s eyes, the most honored of you are the ones most
conscious of Him: God is all knowing, all aware.”

“We take our racism lightly,” I told the women,
“however, it has a severe impact on our personal, spiritual development and on
the wellbeing of real communities, including our own Muslim communities.”
Here’s where I discuss the impact racism has on our communities and how we
perpetuate racism:

Because many nonwhite immigrants have done well
financially, they easily accommodate new forms of anti-black racism. They
acknowledge past racism against African Americans but believe that nothing
prevents them from doing well now. In my own research, I found this immigrant
sentiment over and over again. Nailah, a second generation desi American told
me,“In the Indo-Pak community you hear a lot of, ‘Why don’t they [blacks] just
do this or do that.’ There’s this attitude that if we are foreigners in
this country and we didn’t even speak English properly, and we were able to
establish ourselves and our community, why can’t they do the same.” Not
only does she hear this among her parents’ generation, but also, Nailah stated,
“I hear it from my peers.” Sajdah, an African American woman, stated, “The
immigrants don’t care about black communities because they think that our
condition is because we are lazy...They need to really understand the dynamics
of being an African American...Unfortunately they do not believe that there are
any factors that work against us.”Sajdah is right. As we learn from
the history of white violence that left blacks without the vote despite the
fact that they had attained the legal right to vote, constitutional equality
does not translate into practical equality in housing, education, and
employment when the government does not commit to resources that seek to put
African Americans on equal footing. Ironically, progressive whites often
appear more sensitive and aware of this form of racism than immigrants of color.

While this speaks to U.S. history and policy,
Canadian society also has a racial order that privileges whiteness. In pursuit
of acceptance and inclusion, immigrants ascribe to their society’s racial
hierarchies. As one scholar put it, immigrants accept “the color line in order
to cross over to its advantageous side.” Ironically, it is racism against
immigrants that pushes them to assume whiteness as best they can through skin
color, wealth, education, choice of neighborhood, and other factors that grant
them inclusion in white communities. In this pursuit, they also assume contempt
for blacks and their neighborhoods, which they choose not to live in. This begs
the question, is it even possible for us to assimilate in societies of white
privilege without becoming racist?

The racist comments by Muslim immigrants prove
that it is impossible unless we make a concerted effort to recognize the racial
hierarchies and dynamics in the larger society. Awareness is the first step to
resistance. Interestingly, discrimination against Muslims post-9/11 has moved
Muslim immigrants to this awareness, though it has been slow. Rami Nashashibi,
the executive direction of IMAN, the Inner City Muslim Action Network, a
grassroots organization that serves poor Latino, black, and Arab communities in
the South Side of Chicago, was at the forefront educating and inspiring Muslim
immigrants and their children to see the ways in which they had ignored or
downplayed African American struggle. In one speech, he noted how ever since
9/11 and the war on terrorism, there has been an uproar in immigrant Muslim communities
about racial profiling and the assault on civil liberties, BUT he asked them,
“Where was all this concern for justice before when racial profiling was
happening to black people every day. When a black man is beaten by a cop, where
are the Muslims protesting on the streets? Now that we’ve become the newest
victims of racism, we want everyone to come rallying to our cause, but what
have we done to really help the black community that would make them want to be
a part of our struggle?”

Rami’s words speak to another reason why we need
to confront and end racism in our Muslim communities. We need interracial
solidarity to make the work against Islamophobia most effective and successful.
We see this most clearly in the Muslim Lives Matter movement that occurred
after the tragic death of our beloved brother Deah Barakat and our beloved
sisters Yusor and Razan Abu Salha. That movement stands on the shoulders of the
Black Lives Matter Movement. This is a perfect example of the way in which
different ethnic struggles, civil rights struggles, and liberation struggles
have historically informed and borrowed from each other. We should desire and
encourage this type of collaboration and alliance. The diversity of the North
American ummah provides us an advantage at building such alliances. But yet
again, because of our internal racism, because immigrants were not moved to
align themselves with African American Muslims as Rami laments, some African
American Muslims and also second generation Arab and Desi American Muslims have
criticized what they see as hypocrisy: that you never cared about black lives
until Muslim lives were savagely taken.

This African American sentiment that immigrants
are hypocritical was especially felt and vocalized after 9/11. One African American
imam who I call Imam Hakim told me in 2002 that immigrants “are being tested”
for assimilating into America’s capitalistic “way of life”: “You have built up
your empire, and now there is a possibility that you may lose it, get your
green card snatched and shot back over to Pakistan where you don’t want to
live. Are you willing to give that up?” But, if immigrant Muslims had been
living up to their Islamic duty to help America’s poor in the inner city, Imam
Hakim believes, God would have spared them 9/11 backlash as He has spared
African American Muslims. “But immigrants haven’t done anything significantly
enough to eradicate injustice in America. They haven’t done anything. So now
they have got to pay.”

Imam Hakim’s sentiments against immigrants are
harsh and they demonstrate the type of anti-immigrant racism that many black
Muslims have. For Imam Hakim to say that this is their payback suggests that
immigrants somehow deserve to be the victims of white violence just because
they never stood up for the black cause, as though African American struggle is
the paramount struggle. African Americans demonstrate anti-immigrant racism
when we deny other nonwhite groups legitimate protest and civil rights
protection. When we overlook the discrimination that immigrants have
experienced in the past and present and privilege black struggles over
immigrant struggles, black Muslims contribute to attitudes and social
structures that deny immigrants their rights. We too become complicit in larger
structures of racism.

Most of my speech called out immigrants and
their children for perpetuating racism in the ummah. And this is not because of
my bias, although some have called my analysis that in Amazon reviews of my book. Rather,
it is because immigrants and their children hold the greater amount of power
and privilege in the ummah. Many see themselves as more authentic Muslims, and
they are closer to whiteness, the benefits of which they pursue.

It was important for me, however, to address
African American Muslims’ racism, or complicity in racism (since many argue
that one cannot be a racist without power) to acknowledge that African
Americans carry anti-immigrant prejudices and that all of us must take
responsibility to address racism and facilitate better race relations in the
ummah.

Imam Hakim’s hard-hitting words were my best
example of anti-immigrant sentiments in the ummah; however, I am sympathetic to
his general critiques of immigrants and how they have distanced themselves from
black struggle, especially when they claim an exemplary religious community
that fights against injustice. This issue emerges in critiques of the Muslim
Lives Matter movement: theconcern
among African Americans "that other people so frequently appropriate the symbols
of our struggle but not the burden of our struggle," notes scholar Zaheer Ali.

Women’s responses

Immediately after my talk, I
left for the speaker’s corner where a few women lined up to speak to me. The
first was a Sudanese immigrant woman of my mother’s generation. My opening
story resonated with her. Women from her country brought their tribal tensions
to their Sudanese mosque in Toronto. She has spoken to the imam to address the
women’s discrimination, but he denies it. She believes that if he heard my
talk, it would open his eyes.

Next was a white Canadian
convert who wanted to buy my book. She said that it is as though her social
status decreased when she became a Muslim. She has lost her white privilege
because she looks like an immigrant because of her hijab. In the mosque, she is
rejected by the Arab group on one side and the desi group on the other. The
only time she’s felt comfortable in a mosque is when she visited an African
American mosque in Detroit where she was treated as a sister. Her daughters,
who have Malaysian and Vietnamese fathers, don’t fit in either. Outside the
mosque, they have friends of diverse ethnic backgrounds, but in the mosque,
they are not accepted in their second-generation Arab and desi Canadian peer
groups because their parents are neither Arab nor desi.

An Indian auntie came up to
me, and after hugging me said, “Your talk was amazing. You are right. We are
trying to be white.” She was a social worker and told me that her field made
her aware of my level of race analysis. Her words meant a lot to me since I
spoke about South Asian privilege the most, as they were the group featured in
my book.

Finally, my favorite
encounter was with a Somali immigrant, Fatima. We are the same age and have
children the same age. She too spoke about how it blew her mind that I was up
there speaking to this audience on this topic: “I was like,
‘Do...these...people...understand...what she is talking about?’” Unlike
the multigeneration African Canadian woman described earlier, Fatima couldn’t
conceive their fully grasping it. Her sentiments underscored that what I had
done had never been done before. “You need to come back for RIS [a conference
three times the size of Being ME] and give the exact same talk. Theshuyukh[male teachers] touch on this, but
nothing like what you have done.”

“You can’t tell me that our
people stolen from our lands and brought here in chains can have the same
experience as people who came here on their own free will,” Fatima continued,
affirming the points in my talk. I loved the way she spoke of my ancestors as
her ancestors. And too she claimed the legacy of the slaves who escaped to
Canada via the Underground Railroad. Write down this title, she insisted,Viola Desmond Won’t be Budged.
And then she pulled from her purse a Canadian stamp with a photo of Viola
Desmond. It was her last and she gave it to me. “This is our Rosa Parks, and
yours too. When you get the book, put this stamp on it.”

The women’s responses were
awesome because they affirmed our diversity and the potential for unity. That
my talk resonated with Muslim women of diverse backgrounds from various angles
demonstrates that the work to cross racial divides and resist the hierarchies
that privilege whiteness and pit “racial others” against each other can and
must be a shared goal.

Fatima’s feedback was most
moving because her comments brought to life what I had spoken about in theory,
that the Qur’anic verse that states, God has created us differently to
come to know each other, is a tool guiding us to compassion. “The Qur’an is literally
telling us to show some compassion. To attempt to walk in someone else’s shoes.
To understand where someone else is coming from.”

Fatima literally walked in the shoes of the generations of
African, African American, and African Canadian women who endured slavery and
racism in the Americas. Soon after she migrated to Toronto, only fifteen years
ago, a white man said to her on a public bus, “You are the most beautiful nigra
I’ve ever seen.” While Fatima could have used this as a lesson to henceforth
downplay her blackness and pursue whiteness, to remove herself from the
struggle of the women who came to these shores before her, whose features she
shares, she decided to walk in our shoes, to learn our ethnic struggles. And
this is why I loved that when I showed my unfamiliarity with Viola Desmond and
the terms Fatima used to describe the Canadian history of the descendants of
the Underground Railroad, she asked, “Don’t you know about Harriet Tubman?” “Of
course,” I smiled.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Jamillah Karim is an award-winning author, lecturer, and blogger. Karim specializes in race, gender, and Islam in America. She is co-author of the new book Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Sunni Islam (NYU Press, 2014). Her first book, American Muslim Women, was awarded the 2008 Book Award in Social Sciences by the Association for Asian American Studies. She is former associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Spelman College where she taught courses in the study of Islam for six years. In 2010 Karim traveled with her family to Malaysia where she began her blog “Race+Gender+Faith.” As an independent scholar in Atlanta, she presents her research to scholarly communities and lectures frequently within Muslim communities. She occasionally contributes articles on spirituality for Azizah Magazine. Karim blogs for Sapelo Square, Hagar Lives and Huffington Post Religion. In 2014, she was highlighted as a young faith leader in the African American community by JETmagazine. Karim holds a doctorate in Islamic Studies from Duke University.